Zen and the very mindful art of Newspoll maintenance

Not enough people talk about Anthony Albanese being the first practising Daoist to hold the office of prime minister. Much has been made of his mastery of the turntable and semi-human speech, but his dedication to Daoist principles such as Wu wei remains largely overlooked and underappreciated. And as the latest polls make one thing clear: Albanese is a master Daoshi.

What is Wu wei, I hear you ask? Well, we can’t all be as enlightened as the wonks and politicos. For the uninformed, the renowned sinologist Herrlee G. Creel considered the two contradictory forks of Wu wei, as found in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, to mean two different things:

• an “attitude of genuine non-action, motivated by a lack of desire to participate in human affairs”;
• a “technique by means of which the one who practises it may gain enhanced control of human affairs”.

It’s obvious to me, your average armchair Laozi fan, that Albanese is committed to Wu wei with the same level of enthusiasm his predecessor had for nihilism and mild curry. Where some see a prime minister listlessly drifting towards electoral annihilation, borne on the winds of smugness, apathy and cynicism, I see a noble monk, self-immolating on the steps of Parliament House in his spiritual quest towards nirvana. 

Recent polls suggest that the average voter isn’t as interested in the teachings of Laozi as you or I or the prime minister. Unable to master the art of detachment, voters remain stuck on weak-willed mortal matters, such as having a roof over their heads and/or eating. These vices are all well and good, but it is an unenlightened man’s idea of what a Labor government’s holy purpose is: to teach us patience, or else.  

We must be patient if we want to condemn genocide, for example. We must be patient if we want action on climate change. We must be patient if we want to move away from fossil fuels. We must be patient if we want to raise the Jobseeker rate. We must be patient if we want to address the housing crisis. We must be patient if we want progressive tax reform. We must be patient if we want a decrease in unnecessary military spending. We must be patient if we want to tackle the soaring cost of living. We must be patient and lie down on the bed of nails until it starts to feel good. 

One key figure steering the prime minister’s guided meditations is Tim Gartrell, his chief of staff and top strategist, a man articles love to describe as a mastermind. A “mastermind”, in this context, is someone who has mastered the art of minding out for progress, action, leadership and similarly useless tosh in favour of “small targets”.

Gartrell is your classic neo-Labor ultra-wonk: a lab-bred consultatron5000 devoted to a big picture so big (and blank) you can make it out from space. The wunderkind behind Kevin ‘07 and *cough* Mark Latham *cough*, Gartrell is a champion of the aww shucks approach to governing that has defined every Labor PM since Rudd (the mere attempt of which drove Latham criminally insane). 

Here, the Wu wei method has been interpreted as a sort of gnostic apoliticism — an odd logic to arm yourself with when you purport to work in politics. Instead of a Labor that had permission to tear the throat out of its enemies and leave them bleeding out on a mountain pass, we have a party that decided it has to respond to all external, internal and eternal events with the passivity of roadkill. 

In their 10 years in electoral exile, Labor’s greatest minds milled about the woods and wastelands of focus groups and think tanks until they stumbled upon a universal truth: they are useless. Instead of rejecting this realisation like Christ rejecting Satan in the Judean desert, they chose to embrace it, and made it the cornerstone of their post Rudd/Gillard/Rudd/Other resurrection.

What Gartrell and his followers understood then, and now, is that “the light on the hill” is a fundamentally flawed idea, as it requires a) a light, b) a hill, and c) someone to screw in a new bulb whenever said light goes out. Their radical reconfiguration of the ALP did away with the light and the pesky hill altogether, and replaced them with a low-sensory plain of nothingness. Atop that dimly lit plain, a “small target” can look like a mountain, and the enactment of your opponent’s deeply unpopular tax reforms can look like integrity. 

This “nothing” is at the core of the teachings of the new true believers, who truly believe they’re on to something. So when poll after poll comes back suggesting they may be wrong, one has to laugh. There is no right, there is no wrong, there is only what is and what will be.

The electorate’s impatience with what it sees as uninspired laziness is a test that they must fail if they are to achieve the same level of awakening (often mistaken for apathy by the ignorant) as the prime minister and his acolytes. It’s basic zen and the art of Newspoll maintenance: do or do not, why even try?

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